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Google, Facebook and Twitter will testify next week before a U.S. Senate panel on efforts by social media firms to remove violent content from online platforms, the panel said in a statement on Wednesday.

After several months of talks with the WHO, Facebook has pledged to direct its users to "accurate and reliable vaccine information in several languages" on the WHO's website, the United Nations health agency said, "to ensure that vital health messages reach people who need them the most.''

Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter are among the backers of the ‘Christchurch Call’, which commits its signatories to taking steps to address the uploading and dissemination of “terrorist and violent extremist content”.

Social media executives could spend up to three years in prison and their firms be fined 10 percent of their turnover if they fail to quickly remove violent material from their platforms, according to a new law proposed by the Australian government.

The CEOs of New Zealand’s three largest broadband service providers — Simon Moutter (Spark), Jason Paris (Vodafone) and Stewart Sherriff (2degrees) — have penned an open letter to the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Facebook founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg says the future of social networking isn’t in “open platforms” but in private and secure intimate communications. The CEO said that increasingly people want to be able to connect in the “digital equivalent” of their living room.

Facebook and other big tech companies should be subject to a compulsory code of ethics to tackle the spread of fake news, the abuse of users' data and the bullying of smaller firms, British lawmakers said on Monday.

Facebook says it extend some of its political advertising rules and tools for curbing election interference to India, Nigeria, Ukraine and the European Union before significant votes in the next few months.

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